David Li simply wanted to create a name for himself, to paint a brighter future. He never imagined that a chance encounter would propel him down a much darker path, one that would entangle him in a game of life and death broadcasting over generation...
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- The Old Man -
A bell jangled as the door to Grady's slipped shut. Slowly the old man raised his head, rubbed his bleary eyes, and woke to the world. His stomach lurched, and the room spun.
Hell, he thought. How much tonight?
He propped himself up on one elbow and steadied himself against the table, his fingers catching in a string of spittle and playing against a discarded wad of gum. He couldn't recall drinking more than a beer, maybe two. No hard liquor for sure. Yet still the world performed a magical tilt-a-whirl and he braced against the onslaught, knowing with an unsettling certainty that the drink really had nothing do with his present predicament.
When at last the dizzy spell abated, he weighed his options and determined it best that he pack it in. He had known the risks of leaving his apartment and venturing amongst the dull-eyed cattle still mewling and ignorant of the inner beyond and the vastness of the oil-slick grotto. Enough repetitions and these spells, though manageable, were inevitable and he found no sense in prolonging the misery. A night's rest and perhaps a few days of solitude and the world would realign, his place in it miniscule and blissfully irrelevant.
Standing on wobbly, butterscotch legs, he fumbled a wad of bills from his coat pocket, discarding them on the table as if nothing more than a grease-stained napkin awaiting a busser. No good lay in forced pleasantries and hand-pedaling with the staff when the twist-sense took the pilot's seat.
The ginger-bearded bartender shouted in the old man's wake. "Evening."
The old man made no acknowledgement that he had heard the bartender. His ginger friend would forgive him when next he graced this establishment. Money spent well whether it came on the back of false courtesies or honest indifference.
As he opened the door, welcoming the L.A. night, the first of the cramps stabbed into his gut, twisting and wrenching and corkscrewing his stomach as if wringing a water-logged towel. He stumbled having not braced against the unexpected violation.
"Are you okay?" The bartender again, his voice tinny and fragmented, as if shouted through a sonic kaleidoscope.
"Nothing a jaunt in the dreamwind can't mend," he said, not even certain of his words' meaning as he spoke them.
As the door fell shut behind him, the cramp tightened, and tears welled in his bloodshot eyes. Tonight, something ancient brewed, something he had forgotten and that he had hoped long ago quelled. Something deep within chewed on the soul gristle as it tickled the underflesh.
